Juri Strumpflohner

Juri is a full stack developer and tech lead with a special passion for the web and frontend development. He creates online videos for Egghead.io, writes articles on his blog and for tech magazines, occasionally speaks at conferences and holds training workshops.

Thankful for having attended Belgium's first ever Angular conference

I was lucky enough to be part of the Belgium's first Angular conference: NG-BE conf. It was by far the best conference I've attended so far! So here's a quick recap and a official message to you why should definitely attend the 2017 edition .

The two conference organizers Jurgen and Sam (as well as the whole ng-be team behind) really nailed it: “It’s all about the people”. The whole conference was built around socializing, interacting with the speakers and other community members.

It's all about the people

Just watch the conference intro video:

Conference sessions are one thing, most of them are recorded nowadays and thus you can always watch them later if you want. For me personally, the most important part is to socialize, meet new people and make friends. NG-BE was awesome for that. Speakers and attendees were mixed, all of them in the same room, even for the breakfast in the morning. This is a huge opportunity to meet your Angular idols , to chat with people like Todd, Tero, Pawel or even Igor himself .

Special thanks to an amazing guy: Maarten Tibau

You would never guess what happened after I publicly tweeted that I just bought my NG-BE conf back in October. Maarten Tibau offered to give me a ride from the Brussels Airport to the conference hotel in Ghent . We didn’t “know” each other, we just happened to be connected over Twitter.

@toddmotto same here :) I feel like a VIP: @maartentibau was even so kind to fetch me at the airport when I arrive 😊. Too kind!

If you’ve been following the whole development of Angular recently, this wasn’t that big of a news. The team had already announced their switch to semantic versioning. But still, not everyone heard about it, and the fact they were skipping version 3 was kind of a surprise. Later, I wrote down the main important parts of the announcement, which got then reviewed by Igor and the Angular core team and published on their blog. Read everything about it here:

All sessions recorded and available on Youtube

But there have been a lot of other interesting talks, like the intro to GraphQL by Gerard or on scalable Angular application architectures by Minko. Well, have a look yourself and on the official NG-BE Youtube channel.

Conclusion

I’ve been doing frontend development, even with Angular 1, for a longer time now. But it’s been roughly since November last year when I started to be more active, on Twitter, by contributing to Angular open source projects, and obviously by blogging more Angular specific stuff. It’s been overwhelming how welcoming, friendly and open the community is.

For me NG-BE was exemplary in that it embraced and reflected this kind of community experience . So make sure to watch out for the 2017 edition which is going to happen in December again .

Also, given it’s New Year’s Eve, I’d like to thank all my visitors for the much appreciated feedback I got throughout this year. Big motivation for 2017, thx!!